Sometime ago I received an forwarded e-mail from one of my new team members (Thanks Filip). Devoxx was looking for people to hold 2 talks about scrum.Being a new agile project manager of a large team at the Belgium post, I kept postponing to do a real proposition. (Not really GTD)

Luckily for me Stephan and his team got back to me, asking me if I was still interested. By that time Sylvain had proposed to do an introductionary talk of scrum. Combining a talk with someone I did not know was a big risk to have overlapping content. Especially when one session was scheduled immediately after another.

Then I had the idea why not propose to deliver the XP loops from Pascal & Vera? I have been given this presentation a few times this year, I know the subject by heart, the slides are done and no risk in overlap with Sylvain’s session. On top of that I can do a pair-presentation, which are my favorite presentations anyway.Stephan immediately replied to my proposition, that was ok for him. Sylvain also wrote it was a good idea. Great.

After doing my workshops at the different european XP days, agile 2008 etc, I really want to do more talks like these. Looks like I started myself doing this.

Only later I realized that both Vera and Pascal were not in Belgium during the conference. When I mention this at the Belgium Post to Jef Cumps, he proposed to help me out. Although I told him I wanted to see if I could find someone at XP days benelux that had delivered this presentation before, I instinctively felt it was a good mach. So at Xp days benelux I did not actively look for another person.

During the preparation Jef perfected the slides and kept asking questions to understand the complete picture.As with all presentations and workshops, the preparation is the hard work. The presentation itself is much relaxing and trying to enjoy. (When I’m presenting all fucked up from stress, it never is good.)

Before we started, the video guy ask us not to move so that we would stay into the picture all the time. That felt strange as that is the opposite of what I’m trying to do to keep my presentations fluent.His remark kept spinning in my head, so during the presentation I felt like I was some kind of statue.

Halfway in the presentation I realized I was also avoiding to look at the camera, which made me avoid like half of the public.(Not sure if people notice that when you are in the room, but I always try to look at every part of the room, no matter how many people I speak to.)Officially it is a room of 400 people, I have no idea how many people came to have a look at us.

As usual the slides of the XP Loops are not distributed to the public ( a decision made by Pascal & Vera) , I will post the accompanying notes later this week. Update:you can download the notes here

I had a small but interesting talk with Dave about collaborations between different agile communities I will post some about that in the next days.

Both Jef and I had a great feeling after the presentation and from the feedback I heared and read I think people are happy about it.

Crystal Clear is the agile methodology I mentioned that has some good tips for all kinds of different scaling software projects. Like I said I no nobody that uses crystal, but a lot of people steal idea’s from this book.

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